Happy Avatar

When William Blake meets Hello Kitty there’s bound to be sparks. Happy Avatar transports the reader into a mingled reality of sampled voices, incongruous idioms and enchanting distractions. Bite-sized mashups from celebrity gossip sites, click-bait headlines, intimate messages and serious socio-political analysis mix with Shakespearean form and Biblical rhythms. While revelling in the shiny tackiness of a ceaseless information stream, Happy Avatar offers its readers unsettling meditations on the problem of infinite regress, the crisis of capitalist accumulation and climate change. Formally provocative and absurdly intelligent, D.J. Huppatz’s first major collection challenges us to reconsider poetry’s place in 21st-century life.

“Huppatz’s language is bright and alive; each line acts like a little defibrillator, zapping the reader… Bringing up questions that arise at the meeting points of poetry, consumerism, advertising, globalisation, and grammar, Huppatz’s poems are light measured and often hauntingly beautiful… vivid and wonderfully strange.”—Tim Wright